I've said in some threads (maybe this one too) that we've been having trouble transferring my wife's recordings reliably via pyTiVo because our wifi signal isn't steady enough, and my attempts to use MOCA have not worked.

My wife got the idea of having me move her kitchen TiVo to my son's bedroom (which is located just across the hall from my router, so the signal should be good there) which I did, and after awhile, she didn't like not having access to trickplay features in the morning... typically during the mornings she likes watching the news and weather forecasts in the kitchen, and she likes being able to rewind when she misses something.

So she asked if I could get a fifth TiVo eek: ) to put in the kitchen for that. I reminded her that the reason we moved it is to get pyTiVo to work more reliably. She said that's okay, because she'd just use the TiVo for watching in the mornings, and won't need to archive anything from it. I then asked her if she only cares about rewinding the live buffer, because I think (but am not 100%, but I'm pretty sure) that an old unsubbed S2 TiVo will work from the live buffer + trickplay features, but she won't have any guide data, and I'm pretty sure she won't be able to hit the <record> button to record the live show that's airing either.

She countered that she'd like the ability to record the live show that's in progress with the <record> button. (Why, I'm not sure.) So out of curiosity, I went to Craigslist to see if anybody had any lifetimed S2's for sale, and I did find one ad that was a nice one. She lives not far at all from me, and is selling her lifetimed S2 for $50. That seemed like a great deal, so I replied to the already 9 day old ad, and she still had it.

So I went by, and I thought I'd be smart and test it before buying it, so I brought a tiny hand held DVD player I have, which can also be used as a monitor, because it has video inputs.

I got to her place last night, and the details are: she hasn't used it in 3 years, and it's still packed in her box. She had used it for the 5 years prior to that, so it's actually 8 years old. (She currently has AT&T Uverse, and uses AT&T's DVR, which she confides that she doesn't like as much as TiVo, which says something, because she's comparing it to her old S2, let alone today's models. But she's an AT&T customer and has their DVR, so she feels she has no use for the TiVo.)

Anyway, I plugged it in, and it got stuck on the Welcome screen while powering up. After 10 minutes of being stuck I gave up, as that seems too long. However, having said this, I could be wrong, but the fact that it made it to the welcome screen suggests to me that the motherboard and power supply are okay, and maybe it just needs a new hard drive. It's lifetimed, and so seems to have value in my mind. She also is very tech unsavvy and says she'd have no clue how to work on a TiVo to fix one.

Well she came right and out and said if I'm still interested, I can just take it without paying her, and try to fix it, and if I succeed in getting it fixed, I can pay her what I think it's worth. I was impressed by her trusting nature, and I don't like taking advantage of people, so I gave her my contact information so that she'll know I won't just abscond with her TiVo, and my plan is to try and fix it.

I'm pretty sure I have extra hard drives lieing around my house, so it's possible I could get this thing working at no cost, in which case I feel like I probably should still give her $50. Well I guess I could deduct money for the work I did, but I feel like $50 is such a great deal, even if the only thing wrong is a bad hard drive, I still kind of feel like she deserves $50 if that's all it needs. I might need to get an image for the drive though, and I don't know if I'll have to pay to get an image. (If so, that might be legitimately deducted from her $50.) But this came up once before, years ago, and I lucked out, and somebody on TCF actually sent me the image I needed for free.

Also, we do have 2 other S2's, and maybe we'll luck out and one of them is the same model, and I could get the image from that one... I haven't yet checked to compare model numbers. Also, I do happen to have a computer (the one that's running pyTiVo) that contains a motherboard with IDE connections, so I could certainly use that one to work on this old model S2 (which most probably contains an IDE motherboard in it).

Anyway, I started out saying this was embarrassing, and the embarrassing part is that we actually have 5 TiVos in our house now (albeit one doesn't work yet). It seems kind of absurd to me to have that many TiVos, but a lifetimed TiVo including hardware + sub, all for $50, just seemed like a great deal to me, and my wife wanted it, and it might be hard to beat that price very easily, so I took it.

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On the back where the power cord plugs in there's a sticker and the model number is on that sticker and if it's a TiVo brand TiVo that number will start with TCD (and if the next three characters are 649 I may have to hate you) and if you tell us what it is we can see about getting it running again.

because S2s are set up to use IDE drives but you can get a lot more GB/$ with SATA drives these days, and I'll bet if you get a twinbreeze bracket from weaKnees and put two 1TB drives in there she'll have all 2TB filled in short order.

It could be that the drive is okay but (due to "capacitor plague") the power supply isn't quite up to providing enough current for everything at once.

Well the TiVo I need to repair is model TCD140060, and my other S2s are models TCD540040 and TCD240080. Does anybody know if either of those two have compatible images to the TCD140060, or do I need to look elsewhere for a fresh image?

I'm probably jumping the gun though, because I haven't verified if the hard drive is bad. I'm thinking as a first diagnostic step, I should pull out the hard drive and mount it in my Windows XP computer (which has an IDE motherboard in it), and run a hard drive diagnostic utility to see if the hard drive is good or not.

According to This site, this S2 I just got is the first S2 model ever made.

Edit: I'm confused, because the above site says this model comes with a 60 GB hard drive. Yet I could swear the first S2 I ever bought had a 40 GB drive. Yet they claim this is the first S2 model?

More bad news: I'm looking around my house for spare hard drives, and so far I'm just finding a 20 GB and a 40 GB, which I guess are pretty puny. OTOH, my wife didn't act like she wanted this TiVo to store a bunch of shows on, but mainly to have some kind of timeshifting ability in the kitchen. IOW, not her normal hoarding, but merely taimeshifting.

Edit2: I talked to my wife, and even a 40 GB drive, which would give her 40 hours at basic quality (IIRC) is more than satisfactory to her. She claims she just wants it to be able to hold a couple of shows on it.

Edit2: I talked to my wife, and even a 40 GB drive, which would give her 40 hours at basic quality (IIRC) is more than satisfactory to her. She claims she just wants it to be able to hold a couple of shows on it.

Well, I opened it up. As the link above says, it has a 60GB Western Digital hard drive, and stamped on it is "June 13, 2002". Maybe this thing is older than the owner claimed. I will say it's really clean inside with no dust at all anywhere that I see.

I suppose I could put something bigger than my 40 GB drive in it, but if I can quickly get it working, I'll feel better about knowing what fair price I should pay the girl that lent it to me. I can always upgrade later if I need to.

Wow, it just turns out that I already have a DOS bootable flash drive that tests western digital hard drives. I think I'll use it now to test this drive.

Edit: Darn, the one computer I need to use to test the HD (because it has an IDE motherboard) is the same one that runs pyTiVo, and my wife has it busy right now transferring stuff. With her queue, it'll be tomorrow before I can resume work on this. Oh well.

Well the TiVo I need to repair is model TCD140060, and my other S2s are models TCD540040 and TCD240080. Does anybody know if either of those two have compatible images to the TCD140060, or do I need to look elsewhere for a fresh image?

Yes, it will work, if the image is of v7.1 or later. The 240 and 140 TiVos both use the same software now, but the older versions are different and not interchangable.

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Earlier in that thread, they say if the first three digits are different, you're out of luck, but this guy talks about v7.1 or later. I should look at my TCD240 TiVo that I have to verify if the version is v7.1 or later (which given that thread is 7.5 years old, I'd think that I'm okay). It sounds like I'm in luck, and can use that image.

Say, if I do get this thing fixed for free, do you people think I should still offer $50 to her, which was her full asking price? She did advertise it as working, which it isn't, so I could certainly argue it's worth less, and she seems to be negotiable given it's condition and willing to basically collect from me whatever I say it's worth, but if $50 was underpriced to begin with, and having a bad hard drive is still worth the $50, then I don't want to short change her, and I'll still pay her $50.

I guess my question is: what is a reasonable market value for a lifetimed TiVo that's got a bad hard drive? If those go for $50, then I'll probably pay her $50. But I'm not going higher than that, because $50 was her original asking price. However, if the true market value is less than $50, I may consider offering her whatever that market value is.

Wow, I just found a hard drive lying around I forgot I had, which is 320 GB: much bigger than the other two. But it's SATA, so I'd have to install some kind of adapter to get it to work. I guess I can try that, but it likely won't happen today, as I own no such adapter.

I'm getting very frustrated, because I've spent most of today simply trying to create a bootable CD with disk utilities on it. I preferred a flash drive, but for some reason I can't get my Windows XP computer to boot to a USB drive.

I got it to boot to a DOS bootable CD, but if I try to include drive diagnostics, it no longer will boot. Then I thought to boot to the DOS only CD, and swap CDs to one that contains the diagnostics (as once it boots to CD, it won't recognize the flash drive), but now it won't boot to any CD for some wierd reason.

I've tried switching to a R/W CD after wasting 3 read-onlies, but I get the error message "Unit not ready", and can't burn an ISO to it.

I guess now I'm off to google what that means.

This is just a sampling of what I've gone through today, spending hours getting nowhere on this. I guess I'm not really an expert of how to make bootable CDs or flash drives and have to rely on google, and google hasn't really come through for me today.

I downloaded some program called WinISO that lets me add files to ISOs, so I added the drive diagnostics. Several CDs later, they all failed either because the CDs were unreadable, or there is a bad or missing command interpreter.

But looking at the ISO file on my hard drive (before burning), I don't see any COMMAND.COM, which makes me think the ISO file itself (which I downloaded from internet) is insufficient. It's chock filled with DOS utilities, but the most important one: command.com is missing. I guess now I'll look elsewhere for a better ISO file.

I worry that this entire day will come and go with me making no progress, while I have many other household duties that are getting neglected.

Earlier in that thread, they say if the first three digits are different, you're out of luck, but this guy talks about v7.1 or later. I should look at my TCD240 TiVo that I have to verify if the version is v7.1 or later (which given that thread is 7.5 years old, I'd think that I'm okay). It sounds like I'm in luck, and can use that image.

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Yes, tivo merged the software at some point so that 140s and 240s use the same software. Considering that the S1s ended on v7.3 it would be unlikely that a working 240 isn't at least as current as the S1 software.
The replacement drive will have to be be at least 80gb because that's what's in a 240080, unless the 240 was upgraded from a 240040 image.

I can't believe, I finally get it to boot to a DOS CD, and the drive diagnostic that I added to the ISO prior to burning are mysteriously missing from the CD.

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Your cd burning software should have a "burn as an image" option, which will let you make a bootable copy of the Ultimate Boot CD from the free .iso as well as a bootable copy of the MFS LIve cd v1.4 .iso

The UBCD has drive diagnostic programs from all the major brands to check the drive itself.

Remember, .tbk files have to be restored with WinMFS
(if you don't already have winmfs.exe on that XP machine, PM me)

and .bak files are for restoring with the MFS Live cd.

Back during the single tuner S2 era, Maxtor was making drives with a few more bytes than the competition for a given size, and some of those drives got used in TiVos, so an image from, for example, the 80GB Maxtor that came in my 240 won't fit on an 80GB WD or Seagate, so there's that to worry about.

As to which IDE/SATA adapter is needed for that particular S2, there seems to be some uncertainty as to whether it has to be a Marvell chipset based one, like the S1s, or whether, like the later S2s, it can use either a Marvell based or a JMicron based.

I've got a 140 I can experiment on if I can find a working SATA drive around here.

So I thought I'd try putting hte diagnostics on a separate CD so I could swap them. (Boot to one, use another to run diagnostics.) But I get "General Failure reading drive A". It seems it will only read the disc I boot to.

It's weird: I insert the CD in a different computer, and I see all files just fine, but in the XP computer, it seems them all except the ones I added (the drive diagnostics). I'm having trouble thinking of anything more to try.

Also, I wonder why my later model e-machines computer will boot to my flash drive, but the older model won't. The BIOS lists it as a bootable drive. It already has my drive utilities and DOS in bootable form, so it would be easy and convenient if I could boot to it.

I'd just use my later model e-machines to do this, but it's motherboard is a SATA motherboard, so I'd like to use the other one.

So I thought I'd try putting hte diagnostics on a separate CD so I could swap them. (Boot to one, use another to run diagnostics.) But I get "General Failure reading drive A". It seems it will only read the disc I boot to.

It's weird: I insert the CD in a different computer, and I see all files just fine, but in the XP computer, it seems them all except the ones I added (the drive diagnostics). I'm having trouble thinking of anything more to try.

Reminds me of my Dad. He'd watch his fav shows. Then he got a VCR. And then at first occasionally recorded those fav shows when he otherwise couldn't watch them. He started to fall behind though and eventually was recording everything and watching nothing. It was a vicious circle. The more he recorded stuff so he (could) go back and catch up the bigger the pile got which only increased the odds he'd ever go back. I guess he didn't want to admit defeat. And so it became a running joke.

And in his garage somewhere sits a few large boxes of VCR tapes with every episode of Dallas, Falcon Crest, Dynasty and a few other shows like Dukes of Hazzard starting somewhere after the first few years those shows started airing because even 5-10 years after those shows stopped airing he wouldn't let anyone record on those tapes.

Reminds me of my Dad. He'd watch his fav shows. Then he got a VCR. And then at first occasionally recorded those fav shows when he otherwise couldn't watch them. He started to fall behind though and eventually was recording everything and watching nothing. It was a vicious circle. The more he recorded stuff so he go back and catch up the bigger the pile got whichonly increased the odds he'd ever go back. I guess he didn't want to admit defeat. And so it became a running joke.

And in his garage somewhere sits a few large boxes of VCR tapes with every episode of Dallas, Falcon Crest, Dynasty and a few other shows like Dukes of Hazzard starting somewhere after the first few years those shows started airing because even 5-10 years after those shows stopped airing he wouldn't let anyone record on those tapes.

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Should have bought him a second VCR, although that might have led to tying up both machines recording.

But that's one of the big advantages of the TiVo--you can tie up as many tuners as it has and still watch something you already recorded.